Sloan sighs, shakes his head. “Really, Margaret. Gracie has needs, too. She needs a predictable daily life.” Margaret says, “I’ll phone you later. We’ll discuss our needs.”
She comes out of the house with Gracie. Sloan shouts, “Wait. Gracie’s pills.”
There’s always one more word, one more thing to collect. “Goodbye. Wait.” I wait. We all wait. Margaret and Gracie go back into the house, and I stand outside. I’m uncomfortable inside the house, around Sloan. He’s friendly, but I know too much about him. I can’t help thinking things, making judgments, and then I feel guilty. He’s a fussy type, does everything right. If he’d only fight Margaret, not be so good, so correct. Sloan could make trouble about Margaret’s unscheduled appearances, even go to court, but he thinks if Margaret doesn’t have her way, Gracie will have no mother. Above all things, Sloan fears chaos. Gracie senses her daddy’s fear, shares it. Margaret would die for Gracie, but it’s a difficult love, measured by intensities. Would Margaret remember, in such love, about the pills?
Sloan finds the pills, brings them to the foyer, hands them to Margaret. There. He did another correct thing. She and Gracie leave the house. We start down the path to the sidewalk. Gracie hands me her books and duffel bag, gives me a kiss, and says, “Hi, Herman German. I have an ear infection. I have to take pills four times a day.” She’s instructing Margaret, indirectly.
Margaret glares at me to show that she’s angry. Her ten-year-old giving her instructions. I pretend not to notice. Gracie is a little version of Margaret, not much like Sloan. Chinese chemistry is dominant. Sloan thinks Gracie is lucky. “That’s what I call a face,” he says. He thinks he looks like his name — much too white.
I say, “Hi, Gracie Spacey.” We get into my Volvo. I drive us away.
Gracie sits back. Margaret, sitting beside me, stares straight ahead, silent, still pissed, but after a while she turns, looks at Gracie. Gracie reads her mind, gives her a hug. Margaret feels better, everyone feels better.
While Margaret’s houses are being fixed up, she lives in one, part of which becomes her studio, where she does her painting. Years ago, at the university, studying with the wonderful painters Joan Brown and Elmer Bischoff, Margaret never discovered a serious commitment in herself. Later, when she married and had Gracie, and her time was limited, seriousness arrived. Then came the divorce, the real estate business, and she had even less time. She paints whenever she can, and she reads fifty or sixty novels a year; also what she calls “philosophy,” which is religious literature. Her imagery in paintings comes from mythic, visionary works. From the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian cosmological chant, she took visions of land and sea, where creatures of the different realms are mysteriously related. Margaret doesn’t own a television set or go to movies. She denies herself common entertainment for the same reason that Rilke refused to be analyzed by Freud. “I don’t want my soul diluted,” she says.
Sometimes, I sit with her in her loft in Emeryville — in a four-story brick building, her latest purchase — while she paints. “Are you bored?” she asks.
I’m never bored, I like being with her. I like the painting odors, the drag and scratch of brush against canvas. She applies color, I feel it in my eyes. Tingling starts along my forearms, hairs lift and stiffen. We don’t talk. Sometimes not a word for hours, yet the time lacks nothing.
I say, “Let’s get married.”
She says, “We are married.”
Another hour goes by.
She asks, “Is that a painting?”
I make a sound to suggest that it is.
“Is it good?”
She knows.
When one of her paintings, hanging in a corner of a New York gallery owned by a friend, sold — without a formal show, and without reviews — I became upset. She’ll soon be famous, I thought.
“I’ll lose you,” I said.
She gave me nine paintings, all she had in the loft. “Take this one, this one, this one …”
“Why?”
“Take them, take them.”
She wanted to prove, maybe, that our friendship was inviolable; she had no ambition to succeed, only to be good. I took the paintings grudgingly, as if I were doing her a favor. In fact, that’s how I felt. I was doing her a favor. But I wanted the paintings. They were compensation for her future disappearance from my life. We’re best friends, very close. I have no vocation. She owed me the paintings.
I quit graduate school twenty years ago, and began waiting tables at Gemma’s, a San Francisco restaurant. From year to year, I expected to find other work or to write professionally. My one book, Local Greens, which is about salads, was published by a small press in San Francisco. Not a bestseller, but it made money. Margaret told me to invest in a condominium and she found one for me, the top floor of a brown-shingle house, architect unknown, in the Berkeley hills. I’d been living in Oakland, in a one-room apartment on Harrison Street, near the freeway. I have a sedentary nature. I’d never have moved out. Never really have known, if not for Margaret, that I could have a nicer place, be happier. “I’m happy,” I said. “This place is fine.” She said my room was squalid. She said the street was noisy and dangerous. She insisted that I talk to a realtor or check the newspapers for another place, exert myself, do something. Suddenly, it seemed, I had two bedrooms, living room, new kitchen, hardwood floors, a deck, a bay view, monthly payments — property.
It didn’t seem. I actually lived in a new place, nicer than anything I’d ever known.
My partner, so to speak, lives downstairs. Eighty-year-old Belinda Forster. She gardens once a week by instructing Pilar, a silent Mexican woman who lives with Belinda, where to put the different new plants, where to prune the apple trees. Belinda also lunches with a church group, reviews her will, smokes cigarettes. She told me, if I find her unconscious in the garden, or in the driveway, or wherever, to do nothing to revive her. She looks not very shrunken, not extremely frail. Her eyes are beautifully clear. Her skin is without the soft, puffy surface you often see in old people.
Belinda’s husband, a professor of plant pathology, died about fifteen years ago, shortly after his retirement. Belinda talks about his work, their travels in Asia, and his mother. Not a word about herself. She might consider that impolite, or boastful, claiming she, too, had a life, or a self. She has qualities of reserve, much out of style these days, that I admire greatly, but I become awkward talking to her. I don’t quite feel that I say what I mean. Does she intend this effect? Is she protecting herself against the assertions, the assault, of younger energies?
Upstairs, from the deck of my apartment, I see sailboats tilted in the wind. Oil tankers go sliding slowly by Alcatraz Island. Hovering in the fuchsias there are hummingbirds. Squirrels fly through the black, light-streaked canopies of Monterey pines. If my temperament were religious, I’d believe there had to be a cause, a divinity in the fantastic theater of clouds above San Francisco Bay.